The Best American Essays 2013 (7 page)

Never mind. From then on I could sleep.

RICHARD SCHMITT

FROM
The Gettysburg Review

A
T SCHOOL TODAY
an esteemed member of my department said his grandfather, at age eighteen, “ran off” to join a circus. I thought,
Why do people say it like that? Anyone who ever joined a circus seems to have run away to do it
. My colleague is a poet, a wordsmith, a teacher of language, trained to be precise and accurate. I asked him why he said “ran off.” “Was your grandfather a runaway? A fugitive of some kind?”

“Well, no,” he said. He didn’t know why he said “ran off.” “The romantic exotica we associate with circuses, I guess.”

We don’t say that about other institutions. No one says that they ran off to join a university, or a sports franchise, or a Fortune 500 company, but circus employees are deemed runaways. Even the word
employee
doesn’t jibe with public perception of circus workers. Circus people are not considered employed in the way one works for AT&T or Walmart. In a recent PBS documentary about New York’s Big Apple Circus, the initial segment was called “Run Away.” I can say for sure, because I know people on that show; very few of them, if any, are dyed-in-the-wool runaways. A few directionless young people? Sure. A middle-age crisis or two? Maybe. As
Washington Post
reviewer Hank Stuever said, “Though the dream may be very much intact as a metaphor for escaping life’s monotony, people don’t run away and join the circus much anymore.”

Did they ever? I have not mentioned to my colleagues that by the time I was seventeen, I had run away from home three times. It was not romantic. I lied about my age, worked shit jobs, paid rent on squalid apartments with degenerate roommates. No car, no girlfriend. One morning in 1970, riding in the back of a flatbed truck on the way to a job site, I saw the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus train parked under an I-95 overpass in Providence, Rhode Island. The train was white. The train yard black. I was a brick washer then. I spent my days at a construction site with a hose and a wire brush, scrubbing dried cement off red bricks. Before that I had a job pulling bent nails from boards and pounding them straight with a hammer. Minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. My roommate was huddled in the back of the truck, a junkie, hugging himself and shivering, the wind roaring and whipping. I pointed down at the train yard. “A white train,” I yelled. The kid stared at me. He was drooling. All he heard was the word
white
.

After eight hours of brick scrubbing, blue jeans covered with red dust, I walked under the I-95 overpass, the steel stanchions droning with rush-hour traffic, and into the train yard. The white train was long, split in two sections, and lined up on parallel tracks. I walked between the cars on a concrete walkway receding to a common vanishing point. I looked in the windows and open vestibules. I saw a tanned woman in a gold thong lying on her stomach on a plastic chaise lounge, the folding kind you take to the beach; it was August, and she was gleaming in the late-afternoon sun. Beside her on the concrete was a can of Pepsi in a Styrofoam cooler, and next to that were the shining steel wheels of the train. I walked by in my brick-dust sneakers. She didn’t budge. I passed a small cast-iron barbecue grill and ducked under a makeshift clothesline with laundry drying in the sun. Regular laundry, no spangles or sparkles. Further on a guy stood on a stepladder washing windows. He didn’t look at me. It was very quiet. At some point I climbed three steps into one of the vestibules between cars and looked down the narrow hallways, carpeted, shoes outside doors. I hopped out the other side. There was nothing to see but this brilliant white train in the grimy Providence train yard.

So the picture is clear; I was a directionless youth seduced by what my colleague referred to as romantic exotica. Fair enough. But I was already a runaway. I thought I might find a job here as a practical endeavor, to get away from brick washing and junkies. And though the train was ethereal in context, it seemed more military than magical, functional over fantastic. Bleached underwear hanging over a barbecue grill, a woman sunbathing, a guy washing windows. There were no skirt-swishing, heel-slapping, tambourine-shaking gypsies doing folk dances. No one played an accordion. I headed back to the civic center.

People say “run away to join
the
circus” as if there is only one, and as if there is no doubt about joining it. As if the option resides solely with the runaway. One is fed up; the need to escape strikes; you find this entity called
circus
and presto, you are embraced. I found this was not true.

When I got back to the civic center, I saw piles of animal excrement steaming in the road, steel cargo wagons, elephants chained in a line, large cats in cages, men in blue work shirts with nifty patches:
The Greatest Show on Earth
. You think
circus
and expect this, but it was disorienting in dismal downtown Providence. The potpourri of people, animals, and apparatuses squelched the mundane stench of diesel exhaust and roaring gears from the nearby Greyhound bus station. Workers, people, hustled through massive doors on the backside of the civic center; it seemed anyone could cruise on in. But when I tried, I was halted abruptly by a stick across my chest, a cane wielded by an elderly white-haired gentleman with one leg about six inches longer than the other. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I was hoping to apply for a job,” I said.

“A job, huh? What can you do?”

“I can do anything.”

He scoffed.

What was I going to say?
I’m a brick washer? A nail puller?
Among the few things circuses do not have are bricks and nails.

“You gotta see Schwartzy, and you can’t come in here until you do.”

“Where might this Schwartzy be?”

“How the hell do I know?” His cane swept menacingly overhead. “What do I look like?” He was stout, with his spinal cord warped like a bow, his longer leg thrusting out to one side to accommodate its extra length, and he had a thick orthopedic shoe on the short leg. Later I found out this was Backdoor Jack. An integral part of a system designed to make running away with the circus not as simple as people romantically believe.

I retreated. People scurrying about were unapproachable; they moved with purpose, function, with no intention of stopping to talk to a town punk. That was another thing I learned later: I was a town punk. A condition glaringly obvious to circus people. I approached a longhaired fellow. “Excuse me.” He shouldered on, uttering guttural sounds.
Of course
, I thought,
circus people are foreigners
.

Among the array of wagons scattered behind the civic center was a diner on wheels: burgers sizzled, a line of people stood at a serving window, a woman with a beehive hairdo took money and handed out food and soft drinks. I got in line. I had seventy-five cents. When it was my turn, the woman looked me in the eye. “Cup of coffee, please,” I said.

She set down a Styrofoam cup. “Fifty,” she said, holding out her palm.

I fumbled with my coins, making sure I had her attention. “Where’s Schwartzy?” I said, as if I knew him.

“Train, probably,” she said. “Where else would he be?”

I took my coffee and got out of the way.

Train, probably
. That was a long walk the first time. I headed back. Maybe I could be a window washer. I was qualified for that. I walked and spilled coffee as hot as molten lava over my hand. At the train, the window washer was gone; his stepladder was there, his bucket and squeegee. The tanning woman sunbathed; talking to her was out of the question. I walked between cars, had to be a mile of them. After a while the class of cars deteriorated, the spit polish and flash of the first few cars gave way to peeled paint and sooty squalor. There were garbage bags. The windows weren’t washed. It was like walking from the good neighborhood to the bad, from wide lawns and barbered bushes, to saltbox suburbs, to tenement walkups, to actual animal habitat. Stockcars, pervasive zoo odors, heavy wooden ramps soiled with various types of dried animal crap. Then from the underpinnings of the train, a nest of gray hair atop stooped shoulders emerged, a hunched, troll-like figure crawling from the black belly of the train, dragging a fat rubber hose, the type used for pumping septic tanks. An old man covered in soot and rail cinders. His face resembled a tire tread in dried mud. He chewed something.

“Schwartzy,” I said. “I’m looking for Schwartzy.”

“Pie car,” the old man said, his gums working.

“What’s a pie car?”

The old man considered this. “Pie car,” he said, pointing back the way I’d come. “152.”

I hadn’t noticed the painted numbers next to the vestibules. The car we stood at was 101. I looked back down the line. The next one was 102. I turned and walked. Only fifty-one cars to go. The sunbather was at 137, the window washer at 148. Car 152 was in the good neighborhood. It was a dining car. Of course, circus people eat. Red vinyl booths, center aisle, Formica counter. A cook in a chef’s hat scrubbed a grill. “Closed,” he said.

“Schwartzy here?”

The cook looked down to the end of the car where a baldheaded man squinted from behind bars. I walked toward the barred window. I saw the sign:
PAYMASTER
. “Hi,” I said. Schwartzy was unusually short, with one wayward eyeball, maybe made of glass.

Circus people don’t meet and greet. No one says hello, or goodbye, or what’s up. They tend to stare at you until you state your business, and if you don’t, or if your business isn’t particularly intriguing, they walk away. And many of the administrative circus people, like Schwartzy and Backdoor Jack, had physical afflictions: missing limbs, clubfeet, harelips, purple splotches on their faces, and they all limped. This guy Schwartzy watched me through the bars. I tried to get a fix on which eye was doing the seeing, to which I should be directing my request.

“I was wondering,” I said, “if you had any job openings.”

“Are you a diesel mechanic?”

“Ah, no.”

“I need a diesel mechanic.”

“I was once a dishwasher.” I was in a dining car, after all.

He shook his head. “Try concessions.”

“Concessions?”

“At the building, see Bobby Johnson, he may have something for you.”

“The building?”

He turned his back on the window.

I headed back to the civic center—
the building
.

Concessionaires were young and hung out front by the ticket windows, a bunch of them wearing candy-cane-striped smocks and setting up souvenir stands. They were hawkers, vendors, watching for anyone with money. “Hey you, come ’ere, how much money you got?”

“I’m looking for work,” I said. “Do you know Bobby Johnson?”

“Do I know Bobby Johnson?” The kid was about my age, sitting on a box with his back to a wagon; he looked over at a tall black guy with a goatee who was piecing together a program display. “Hey, Pierre, do we know Bobby Johnson?”

It was clear that they did. “Do you know where he is?” I said.

“Do we know where he is?” He turned his face toward the open door of the wagon; inside I saw a desk, a swivel chair, a bunch of cardboard boxes. “Does anyone know Bobby Johnson?” It was clear too, he was messing with me.

Bobby Johnson, head of concessions, was inside the wagon, and, incredibly, he wore a black eye patch. He was tall, thin, and soft-spoken. He shook his head sadly. “I got nothing now,” he said. “Why don’t you head over to the red show? They’re right down the road in Philadelphia.” Ringling had two traveling units back then, red and blue; now they have a third, gold show, traveling different routes simultaneously. I had never been out of New England; Philadelphia, right down the road to this guy, might as well have been in Greece.

Not ten feet away the black guy, Pierre, suddenly bellowed, “Programs! Get your programs!” There were absolutely no ticket buyers; the show didn’t start for three hours. The front of the building overlooked a plaza facing downtown Providence. Men and women in business suits slogged out of office buildings and headed for parking garages. Pierre kept roaring, “Programs!” It was baffling and earsplitting. People two blocks away turned their heads.

At one point his boss, Bobby Johnson, poked his head out the door of the wagon and said, “Pierre, shut up, please.” But the guy kept hollering. Johnson was a quiet man; I bent to hear what he said, which was, “Sorry, no jobs.” At that point I gave up. In spite of romantic notions to the contrary, it seemed clear that one didn’t simply decide to join the circus and have them issue you a bandanna and a tambourine. I was doomed to my squalid apartment, junkie roommate, and brick washing.

But when I turned to go, Pierre stopped shouting and said, “Half these guys will quit when we go west.”

“What?”

“What do you mean, ‘what’? You want a job, don’t you? All the guys you see here will quit when we go west.” He raised his voice, shouting into the wagon, “Won’t they, Bobby? Won’t they quit when we go west?” Then to me, “Happens every year. You come to Albuquerque, he’ll put you on.” He gave me a reassuring nod. “Won’t you, Bobby? Won’t you put him on if he comes to Albuquerque?”

The boss poked his head out the door again. I watched his one good eye. Was he nodding? He was nodding. “Yeah,” he said. “We always need help in Albuquerque.”

“See, told you, come to Albuquerque you’ll have a job. Programs!”

Upon further questioning, it became clear that this show was about to make one of their longest jumps of the season, a three-day run from the next town, Boston, across the country to Albuquerque, New Mexico. They rarely had runs that long, and when they did they always lost a lot of help. “Most of these guys are easterners,” Pierre said. “They don’t want to go out west. Happens when we come back too, the westerners all quit.”

If Philadelphia was Greece, Albuquerque was another planet. I was raised in Rhode Island; my travel experience was limited to six-hour traffic jams each summer when my parents tried to get us to Cape Cod in July. I had twenty-five cents to my name. All I knew about Albuquerque was I would need a plane to get there, and I knew plane tickets cost more than a quarter. Walking back to my apartment, I reasoned it out. The circus was in Boston two weeks; two brick-washer paychecks at sixty bucks each; if I held out on the rent, paid weekly, I would have $120. I stopped at a phone and invested ten of my twenty-five cents to discover that one-way to Albuquerque was $80. Eureka! If I could dodge my landlord and roommates for a couple weeks, I would run away to join the circus.